‘Has Bill Ackman Fucking Lost It?’
The controversial hedge fund manager has always been a supremely confident investor, and Trump is his latest conviction buy.
IN SEPTEMBER 2023, I TRUDGED through a downpour to the far West Side of Manhattan for a CNBC financial conference. It’s the sort of event that promises big scoops but usually delivers the news equivalent of day-old coffee.
Some major industry figures were there alongside top anchors at CNBC. But one name in particular had beckoned me: Bill Ackman. The famous hedge fund manager was set to keynote the Delivering Alpha investor summit, and I, something of an Ackmanologist, really wanted to know what was going on with him.
Ackman had gotten very online during the pandemic. In March 2020, he went on CNBC and delivered an emotional jeremiad about the danger COVID posed to the American economy, which became known as the “hell is coming” rant; markets tanked after—some took his warning to be the impetus for a massive sell-off—and thanks to a multi-million dollar bet he set up before he went on air, he ended up making billions of dollars. After that, he started posting increasingly wild takes online, from backing Sam Bankman-Fried after the FTX collapse (“Call me crazy, but I think @sbf is telling the truth”) to supporting the weepy Kenosha gunman and MAGA hero, Kyle Rittenhouse.
By the time of that conference, Ackman was spending more time tweeting about politics and international conflicts than he was making bold market calls. For months, he’d been urging the Democrats to replace Joe Biden. He had also become a devoted Ukraine booster amid that country’s ongoing attempt to fend off the Russian invasion. While I respect a good moral stand as much as the next guy, Ackman becoming a font of war commentary definitely felt—well, a bit off-brand. Soaked and grumpy, I took a seat and waited to hear from him.
Onstage he was the same old Bill. He gave crisp, assured answers with his signature confidence, the kind of assurance only someone who’s made (and lost) billions of dollars can project. And he made headlines—two of them in the space of about twenty minutes.
His first newsworthy disclosure was that he’d invested $24 million in drone maker Zipline and other Ukrainian initiatives after meeting with the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Interesting, yes, but very much in line with his ongoing commitment to the Ukrainian cause.
The second headline-generating disclosure, though, caught many in the audience off guard. When asked about his other recent tweets, Ackman casually let slip that he had come closer to agreement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccines—that is, he’d accepted RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories about them. Ackman, who had begged the world to get vaccinated to stop COVID-19 and once called RFK Jr. a “wacko,” had come around thanks to the “risk and reward” calculus of parenting a young child. While the vaccine shift was one some Ackman watchers had anticipated thanks to some ominous tweets and comments he made during a prior CNBC interview, it surprised many of the financiers, journalists, and industry insiders in his audience.
Following the interview, I was sipping a coffee and thinking about the implications of this admission when a well-known Wall Street figure sidled up next to me, leaned in, and whispered: “Has Ackman fucking lost it?”
A year out from that CNBC summit, it’s a question more and more of Ackman’s peers and my colleagues in journalism are asking.
THE SWERVE INTO VACCINE SKEPTICISM was not a detour: Since that event in September 2023, Ackman has ridden a highway all the way to MAGA town. Today, his X feed is full of unfiltered pro-Trump, anti–Democratic party rhetoric. He fully embraces RFK Jr., and he regularly inveighs against the dishonesty of the mainstream media, the evils of liberalism, weak borders, and the scourge of wokeness. Sometimes, he even tweets about finance.
A few weeks ago, while journalists continued to discuss Trump’s bizarre “They’re eating the cats!” outburst during the presidential debate, Ackman reposted a perfectly baseless theory that ABC conspired with the Harris campaign to give her an advantage, including by supplying her with the questions in advance. Ackman’s source was a series of screenshots that appeared to come from an AI-generated content farm. But despite the claim’s dubious origins, Ackman ran with it—hard.
In a series of follow-up posts that included an open letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger—Ackman addresses him as “Bob” and signs off as “Bill”—Ackman wrote, “While I can’t determine the veracity of the allegations, they do match substantively what took place during the debate.” He urged Iger to take him seriously nonetheless. Continuing his tweetstorm, Ackman insisted that ABC’s lack of direct response to his allegations was itself proof of guilt, and two days later, he posted that he would be alerting the SEC about the network’s malfeasance. That post got a lot of attention, but mostly because Ackman mistakenly tagged the wrong SEC, presumably adding a bit of extra drama to this year’s Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn.
But while Ackman is now pushing the MAGA agenda, his identity as a consummate Wall Street insider is still important to him. That’s why he can’t help dropping big names. The contrast between his newly adopted ideology and his elite public persona and reputation has come to define his posting style—you might call it a sort of top-down populism.
In this spirit of contradiction, Ackman posted that his team had done an investment research presentation on Harvard at the behest of famed finance writer Jim Grant. The slide deck slams the university for skyrocketing tuition, flat enrollment, and misallocated faculty, all while highlighting Harvard’s crumbling reputation on free speech, which it has destroyed for the sake of wokeness. But despite all his culture-warring indignation, Ackman just couldn’t bring himself to slap a “Sell” rating on his alma mater. Even after helping to remove the president, claiming the endowment is propping up the school’s shaky financials, and castigating the institution on free speech grounds, he still gave Harvard a “Hold.” Prestige, it seems, is one thing the late-coming populist remains unwilling to sell.
I’VE FOLLOWED BILL ACKMAN CLOSELY for a decade now, and spent about four years writing about him on an almost daily basis at the Wall Street blog Dealbreaker. Taking into account his recent shifts, I feel I can tell you this: Ackman hasn’t lost it. He hasn’t gone rogue, and his MAGA turn isn’t some erratic lunge. This is a long presaged development in Bill Ackman Thought. It was seeded by his deep frustration over the seeming disappearance of centrism from American politics, his deep involvement in Ukraine, and his unexpected alignment with RFK Jr. on vaccines. Negative press about him and his wife, who was accused of plagiarism, furthered this development, too. But October 7th was the day Ackman’s mind changed in a fundamental way. The Israel-Hamas conflict, and its domestic fallout, is what brought MAGA Bill into full flower.
But the basic contradiction of Ackman’s new public persona has never been resolved, and Ackman still feels a deep need to be seen as an elite Wall Streeter. This suggests his move toward MAGA is less a complete ideological transformation than, perhaps, a calculated short on what he sees as an overcrowded trade in Wall Street liberalism. Ackman may not be blind to Trump’s deep and varied flaws, but he is willing to look beyond them, even if it means he gets labeled as an anti-woke hedge fund guy. It’s just another contrarian position in a career that has been defined by them.
To understand this mentality, it’s useful to rewind to this time last year. In the aftermath of October 7th, Ackman pivoted from Ukraine to Israel. His Twitter feed became a continuous defense of Israel’s right to protect itself, and he demanded unwavering support for the country. But that was just his warmup for what would follow.
When a group of Harvard students signed an open letter supporting Palestine, Ackman didn’t just tweet his disagreement in strong terms. He demanded that Harvard release the names of the signatories so Wall Street and other sectors could blacklist them from jobs and internships. Forget debate or dialogue. It was time for punishment.
Even in the self esteem–driven world of hedge funds, Ackman stands out for the staggering size of his ego. His investment style is defined by deep analysis and balls-out audacity: He often makes calls on stuff no one else will touch and then spends months, or even years, explaining why everyone else is wrong. And, unlike most of his peers, Ackman has proven himself highly reluctant to let new information or data change his thesis or position. He has the diamond hands of the mind.
Sometimes, this strategy works. When it does, it’s spectacular. He made a nearly 10,000 percent return on his bets against the market during the pandemic. But sometimes, it doesn’t. And when things go south and Ackman starts to feel challenged, something activates in him, and he becomes a savage in a perfectly tailored suit.
When Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, didn’t respond to the campus antisemitism controversy the way Ackman wanted—that is, by resigning—he went all out. It was vintage Ackman: an audacious call. He promoted claims she’d plagiarized her academic work and demanded she resign. It wasn’t long before Gay was no longer president.
Then came the predictable backlash to Ackman’s high-handed campaign against Gay. Business Insider ran a piece accusing Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, of plagiarism in her dissertation. It was at this point that Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager, and Bill Ackman, MAGA radical, started to merge together into a Cronenbergian hybrid.
For context, Ackman is something of a “Second Wife Guy.” Oxman, who is Israeli, is a celebrated MIT professor, architect, and designer who reportedly turned down a date with Brad Pitt because she was dating Ackman. The relationship has become central to Ackman’s public image. So when Oxman’s academic integrity came under fire, Ackman didn’t just defend her—he went nuclear. From Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, he demanded meetings, apologies, and retractions, and he occasionally threatened to sue.
Ackman’s transformation was nearly complete. When Biden finally said he would not run for re-election, Ackman, who had called for Biden to step aside for more than a year, did not greet the news with gladness. Instead, he posted that Biden’s use of a press release with his digital signature to announce his decision signaled a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. The ship of state was without a captain, Ackman implied. To put a point on the direness of the situation, he wrote, “If I were China, I would invade Taiwan tomorrow.”
“HAS ACKMAN FUCKING LOST IT?” What I’d argue if a Wall Streeter asked me that question today is that Ackman’s MAGA turn is a natural next step in the development of his well-documented personality. He’s always been a man with obsessive convictions, a guy given to trolly contrarianism, a person with an unshakable belief in his own rightness. The parts are all there. What’s changed is the context in which he’s using them.
We even have a clear, direct precedent for his most recent activities and obsessions. In 2012, Ackman publicly accused the supplement company Herbalife of being a pyramid scheme and built a billion-dollar short position against it. It wasn’t just an investment; it was a crusade. Ackman spent millions lobbying regulators and launching a ceaseless PR blitz against Herbalife. Carl Icahn, an old Ackman foe, famously called him a “crybaby” on CNBC and took a stake in Herbalife just to spite him. To give a sense of Ackman’s popularity at the time, many people on Wall Street openly rooted for Icahn, an infamous and reviled corporate raider.
Ackman went on to lose $500 million on his short. But rather than hedge his bet, he doubled down, vowing to hold it “to the end of the earth.” Only after losing almost a billion dollars did he finally limp away in 2018, but has publicly declared that he is still “psychologically short” on the company. He had attempted to use an unimaginable amount of money to force the market to bend to his conviction, and in the end, all he was left with was the conviction.
For all his theatrics, I have never doubted the sincerity of Ackman’s feelings. Even when he called in to CNBC in March 2020 and cried while shorting the market, I believed the tears and emotion were real. Frankly, it would be easier to classify him as a shrewd, cynical operator. It’s more challenging (and, frankly, unnerving) to accept that the guy really means it.
That’s what makes Ackman, in the end, such a compelling figure: He’s both a virtuosic money man and a perfect mark for the MAGA con. Trump, like Ackman’s Herbalife short, represents an audacious, high-risk, high-reward bet—just the sort of proposition that stirs Ackman’s heart. Trump is his latest trade. And, as suits him, Ackman isn’t taking half steps. The American political center he once tried to hold is gone, and Trump is his perfect antagonist play to protest our new reality.
Whether he likes or agrees with Trump is immaterial. And unlike other billionaire Trump supporters, Ackman isn’t in it to make a buck—not exactly. The truth is a bit stranger. As with all his positions, Ackman’s support of Trump is ultimately about showing that he is right about being right.
A Trump win would amount to a personal vindication—a successful defense of Ackman’s family and his worldview. In characteristic fashion, he’s taken Trump, a deeply flawed and volatile asset, and bet that through sheer force of will he can create some real value—even if the value is completely unquantifiable.
Has Bill Ackman fucking lost it? My answer would be: Only if Trump loses.
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